Designers, artists, and other users may use a color harmony to color a webpage or other artwork. A color harmony is a set of colors that are derived from one or more base colors using a color harmony rule. As used herein, colors in a color harmony set are referred to as derived colors or harmony colors.
Design and graphics related applications, such as Adobe® Illustrator®, include interfaces or tools that may be used to select a color harmony. Some of them allow the user to select a single color (the base color) and specify a harmony rule. The application then outputs the color harmony corresponding to the selected base color and the harmony rule. The harmony rule choices are typically displayed as a text list of standard harmony rules, such as split complementary, triad, complementary, and analogous. One tool displays the harmony rule choices as thumbnail sized icons on buttons. Each icon shows a schematic diagram of a color wheel (a circle with black dots at different locations on the circle) that represents the harmony rule.
Text lists and icons are limited in their ability to allow a user to visualize the actual derived colors that correspond to each color harmony rule. For example, many users are not aware of all the standard color harmony rule names. Even if they are aware of the color harmony rule names, color harmony rules are typically geometry based, and it is difficult to visualize color in terms of geometry. Besides geometry based harmony rules, some harmony rules are more complex and can't be represented by a color wheel icon. In some cases, custom or user-designed harmony rules are used, but a user may not remember the custom harmony rule or may not be the creator of the custom harmony rule, making it even more difficult to visualize the derived colors for custom harmony rules. It would be useful to have an improved interface for selecting a color harmony rule.